Search This Blog

Review: 9

A compassionate doctor leaves his legacy on a world destroyed by a war between man and machine, through these nine hand-stitched puppets the doctor lives on.

9 (Elijah Wood) wakes up in a daze, there are no humans left in this post-war world. 9 is not alone though, he has eight predecessors to keep him company. 1 (Christopher Plummer) is the de facto leader of the group, but 7 (Jennifer Connelly) often subverts his will. The rest of the cast are unique, but only in voice, their appearance is hard to tell apart in the more harried scenes.

9, against 1's wishes, wants to explore the regions surrounding their home. He eventually convinces the others, but not at the cost of losing one of their ranks on the trip back.

The doctor created these puppets to create some semblance of goodwill, but the puppets' world is dominated by a misanthropic entity called the Beast. The Beast is the leftover from a Dictator and 1-9 worry for the fate of the doll who didn't make it home. The Beast is rumored to steal souls.

A talented voice cast consisting of Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly, Martin Landau and Christopher Plummer strive to give their characters a sense of life, but most of the concern of the story is placed on the red-eyed monsters that plague the nine burlap sack dolls.

Too adult to be a child's film and too child-like for adults to enjoy, 9's market audience will be hard to find. Director Shane Acker really seems to care about the characters hounded by evil machines in a post-apocalyptic future but the love he shares doesn't quite make it to the audience.

Adapting a short to a feature-length film is difficult and the filler scenes that make up 9's short runtime are pretty monotonous. Venturing from one occupied territory to another should be more entertaining. Here, Acker could really get into visual flourish, but the sequences feel copy and pasted.

Apparently the film is much better film under the influence though. The row sitting behind me in the theatre got quite a kick out of the characters' name being numbers. Another scene where 6 (Crispin Glover) sits and massages his head with a magnet hit them in stitches.

Between this, Whiteout and Tyler Perry's latest movie, it's been a slow week for film. It may be a better use of time to go through your home collections and watch something you have been putting off for a while.

Popular posts from this blog

Weird is rarely used as a good quality in film criticism, but few words so completely describe Charlie Kaufman’s work as weird does. All of his films are a window into his very particular worldview, and that p.o.v. is certainly unlike anything seen in pop culture. For that reason, Anomalisa became an entry on many most anticipated lists for 2015. That Kaufman chose stop-motion to tell this story made the picture an event. So it came as a disappointment when the film was one of the year’s more mundane efforts.

Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have an energy and heart at the center that is not present here. Previous collaborators like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry were able to temper the overwhelming negativity Charlie Kaufman occasionally falls prey to, but, this time, the writer doesn’t have a director to rein things in. In all of his efforts to create an experience that is both familiar and alienating, Kaufman may have accidentally created something host…

It may surprise many that Martin Luther King Jr. never received the celluloid treatment prior to Selma. Sure he had been mentioned in other historical pieces, but short of documentary footage, King was never given center stage. Quite shocking given the man's legacy and the lingering effect of his efforts still felt today. Several years of production and a director change later, Selma arrives as the film worthy of the man.

Westerns have never recovered from the oversaturation that killed off viewer interest decades ago, but every now and then a gem pops up. Recent successes like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007’s 3:10 to Yuma and the Coen brothers adaptation of True Grit all did well because they tweaked the genre slightly, but director Kristian Levring goes with an old school approach. A faithful recreation of those revenge Westerns made so popular in the 1970s, The Salvation envelopes many elements of previous Clint Eastwood classics and wraps it into a tidy package.

The Salvation starts in on the central dilemma, joining Jon (Hannibal‘s Mad Mikkelsen) at the train station where he awaits the arrival of his wife and son. Jon and his brother, Peter (Mikael Persbrandt), have lived in the United States long enough to build a hospitable life for their family back in Denmark. This homecoming should be a sweet moment to establish the family important to Jon, but fate plays out…